The Plate Analogy

I have always worked hard for the things I have sought to achieve in my life because this is what I was brought up to believe is the right thing to do. No 'getting handed stuff on a plate' - a sense of entitlement is baffling and almost offensive to my ethos. Where can the sense of pride be when you have not strived for or legitimately worked towards the achievement? Personally, my conscience would not allow it if I did not think I had earned whatever the achievement or advancement was. 

I think this message was hammered home to me by my high achieving mother who taught us that nothing was out of our reach in life but that to work hard to get to where you want to be makes the achievement worthwhile and validates the success. I watched her do this all my life. I still watch it now.

So, when I wanted to progress in my previous career at University of Wolverhampton I had to apply myself, work hard from the bottom up and achieve the necessary recognition to move forward - a process which felt both organic and appropriate. When I left I was managing a team I had built and developed from scratch and I had the full belief and support of my Dept Head/Manager - one of the most inspirational mentors (and women) in my life to date. It felt right and walking away from it to come to Australia was incredibly difficult because of that. 

Similarly, when I decided to do my MBA whilst working full time it required dedication on a level I was not aware existed previously and on many nights I sat at the kitchen table between 7pm-3am typing, reading and trying to keep on top of the mammoth amount of coursework. It was a test of endurance as much as an application of knowledge and it made the finish line all the sweeter when I finally crossed it.

Over the last few weeks I have discovered quite unexpectedly that fairness and equality are MASSIVE drivers for me. I never quite realised to what extent I am personally appalled when a decision is handled without an ounce of objectivity, consideration or forethought, when it is made for convenience and with no element of a fair process in place. I guess this is why I have been starting to consider a slight change in career path - because the processes around fairness and people are the ones which at this point in my life inspire a passion and a new-found area in which to apply myself (should I ever get the chance).

This diagram kind of sums up my current mindset really:

Simple but so very true.

I don't hold much truck with folk who continually whinge about how unhappy they are but just never do anything about it and it certainly is not my style. Over the last few weeks I have combined previously learned CBT skills (how many times a year am I grateful for those tools!?) and the above analogy to figure out a plan to get me past how I feel right now. 

I feel pretty positive about the new plan so I guess I should feel grateful (almost) for the way in which a shitty situation has left me feeling, now that I have fully processed the negative emotions and learned the lessons that they have taught me.

The below diagram is not just an awesome example of typography (taken from a rather amusing list of things designers wish their clients knew) but it also represents a core belief of mine and one which I now know I need to cultivate further as a central part of my decision making going forward.

One lesson which rings true for me again and again is that when something makes you react emotionally it is pushing your buttons for a reason - to teach you something. I struggle sometimes to reign in the desire to let that emotion get the better of me, though I am getting better at it as time goes on. 

For now, I am planning, soothing myself with good things in life and looking forward with a familiar old mindset firmly in place - determination. Onwards and upwards and no dwelling on the past - karma always catches up so I am certain that at some point I can look back on this time and see it as a wonderful catalyst to a better point.

Thoughts for 2014

Happy new year!

I have had a great holiday period, enhanced by the fact my parents were over from the UK and it was my first Australian, summertime Christmas. And also my first Christmas on a boat, which was lovely, but weird. I have had lots of time to reflect as we spent a week with intermittent 3G (imagine!) and I properly unwound for the first time in months (possibly since emigrating) and let my mind wander without boundaries.

Our boat for Christmas week - Hannah-Joy

The result of this is some new goals and plans for 2014. I won’t call them resolutions because, from experience, labelling them as such dooms them to failure before Easter. These are more guidelines and amendments for the way I want to be going forward and are also influenced by the fact I turned 35 on New Year’s Eve.

It is not so much the ‘being 35’ that bothers me but the fact I am now only 5 years off 40 and 15 off 50. My life seems to be sliding away too fast and I guess this sadistic peering round the corner at the next big milestones has made me feel a little rattled by the fact that I have somehow reached 35 about 10 minutes after my 25^th birthday. Or at least, that’s how it feels.

So, throughout this year (but not by any particular defining dates) I want to slowly get fitter, eat cleaner, move more and become more tolerant of stupid people. Of all of these things the last one, for me, will be the biggest challenge.

I came to the conclusion that these are the areas I want to focus on to make me a better person after reflecting on the things I do well and the things I don’t do well at, a summary of which is as follows...

Things I believe I am good at:

Correspondence – I always return calls, emails, letters, communications of any kind. I often instigate the sending of the same, even when I know I am sending them into a non-responsive vacuum (which kind of baffles me). I have a busy life but I always reply to things because people matter and making time to reply to anything that someone has bothered to send me is not a chore, it’s just polite. I would like to be less upset about it this year when people just don’t respond to things cos that’s a reflection on them rather than on me (and anyway it’s physically impossible to actually respond to anything ever when you have kids so that’s a handy caveat to employ as reasoning most of the time). 

Cooking – man do I love to cook. One of my favourite things in life is seeing how happy my cooking makes my husband, friends and family. I was over the moon when my mother in law sent me a birthday text which also said she was craving one of my pad thai dishes! I want to learn to cook more ‘clean’ things though, living in a country with such an abundance of fantastic fresh produce is inspiring this and I also want to pick my quorn blog (which is quite flatteringly now pinned all over pinterest!) back up again and develop it further.

Talking and listening – I know I can usually get my message across in any situation and if you put me in a room with a total stranger I won’t find the situation distressing. I am always capable of filling/bridging awkward silences. I pretty much talk for a living as a project manager – with clients, departments, colleagues and partners and I love it. I don’t want to change this at all.

Things I believe I am not very good at:

Tolerating idiots – this is why I definitely made the right decision in not doing my teacher training. I mentally find it such a massive battle to have patience with people who don’t grasp concepts, ideas or just sentences quickly or need to live their life through a drama filter. This is getting worse as I get older and have to bite my tongue every time a ranting doofus pipes up on social media; hell, Facebook in particular is a stream of ranting idiots these days, a pestilent, semi-literate, Jeremy Kyle-esque, flow of continuous ranting status updates - usually just vague enough to provoke lots of similarly malignant responses from other drama whores. Going forward I will hide/cull more of such tosspots and not worry so much about them realising I have done so.   

Enjoying exercise – although I am getting better at this, largely thanks to Zumba and living in a country where I spend far more time outside. I still detest running (despite a brief and godawful flirtation with it last year) and this year it’s all about walking more (better for my knees) and keeping up the Zumba sessions. I also want to start swimming seeing as the sea is virtually on my doorstep and very warm at this time of year. The shark issue I am pushing firmly to the back of my mind.

Fashion – yep, there you go. I am a jeans and t-shirt kind of girl, always have been. I feel like a complete tool usually when I wear anything other than these kind of things and usually this doesn’t bother me but I would like to maybe evolve into someone who actually has a defined and less tomboyish ‘look’ and maybe learn not to hate clothes shopping quite so much. At the moment the fact that I work somewhere that I don’t have to wear business dress is causing me issues as my home and work wardrobe are now one and the same – whilst this has it’s perks (I don’t have to engage brain in a morning) it also has downsides. Namely, that I feel very conscious about my lack of any kind of fashion sense. I probably shouldn’t care but I do so I figure I should maybe set myself the challenge of trying to change this.

So, these are the things I am going to try and work on over the coming months. There are other things too – some potential professional/career related ambitions and a general promise to myself to read more books and less Digg on the tram (but that site is SO addictive!). I will no doubt be back to update on these various intentions soon and I have also not abandoned the #100books challenge (it's just that the new Donna Tartt came out and I got a bit derailed!).

I am currently sat on my porch after work, in the sunshine with a cup of tea so all in all things are not going too badly this year - long may this continue!

You Know Nothing

Looking back now at my 16 year old self I am amused by the idiocy of my beliefs and values and the thing that strikes me as the most ironic is the silly notion I had back then of what it meant to be a hero, a godlike being, a man on a pedestal. It reminds me of Ygritte in Game of Thrones looking at Jon Snow with a mix of pity and wonder and saying “You know nothing, Jon Snow” with such utter certainty.

There was this person who I saw amazing things in at that age; we were close friends, the 16 year old girl in me was convinced that destiny would unite us and to be fair I was bordering on obsessed with the poor guy. I certainly believed that he was ‘different’ from all the other teenage boys and was sure that he felt the same about me as I did about him.

Funny how things turn out.

I was right about some things, he certainly achieved far more in his life than people at the time would have believed possible. But academic or career achievements do not automatically make you a better person and some things, sadly, are inevitable. One of them is particular to men and I have written about it before. It is the inability to maintain friendships with other women when their partners can’t or won’t accept it. Regardless of past history or shared experiences.

The most ironic thing is that many years ago I realised, on reflection, what a bad match we would have been. Once I had actually fallen properly in love with my husband-to-be the trifling affections I had ever had for anyone else seemed quite amusing by comparison and I was able very quickly to see that in reality, as an adult, we really would not have made a good match at all.

So, his current partner, also an old school friend, had/s no reason to be worried. It is kind of amusing to feel threatened based on a well known, anecdotal, crush which never evolved. Surely she too can see and feel that all of us have moved on eons from how we were at 16?! I would be slightly worried if after travelling the world, 8 years of further study and self-reflection, marriage and a myriad of life experiences, I still thought and felt the same things as I did when we left school, right?

Anyway, it made me start contemplating what I might tell my 16 year old self, if I had the chance to go back in time (not that the precocious, over-confident 16 year old me would listen mind you). I came up with these things:

Things I would tell my 16 year old self…

1. Try not to get a taste for beer in the next few years – it will make you pile on the pounds at University and scupper any diets for years to come.

2. Start actually taking care of your face. I know you don’t wear make-up but you still need to moisturise. 

3. You may think a certain boy is god, on some kind of pedestal, hero worshipped. You will realise in later life quite how funny this is. Don’t waste your time, move on.

4. Read MORE. Keep reading and listen to Chris Tyler, she is right about the classics and you will ‘discover’ them later in life and wonder why you did not read them now.

5. Look around you at the friends you are close to. Only two of them will still be important in your life at the age of 34. You will, however, still be tenuously linked to many of the others on a hideous platform called ‘Facebook’.

6. Don’t bother doing a Media Studies degree – stick with a subject you know and love. By the way, you haven’t tried Philosophy yet but you will love it.

7. Stop considering yourself to be so hard done by; you may not have a perfect 2.4 family but believe me you will come to value this in later life.

8. Being ‘angst ridden’ is not as cool a look as you think it is.

9. Never, ever, get drunk on pernod. Or tequila. Unless you want your stomach pumped (and believe me, you don’t).

10. When you meet a guy called Stuart at a gig in the next year, pay particular attention to his teeth and NEVER ask him for a piggyback.

11. Sort out your passport; travel is going to play a big part in your life. Bigger than you think.

12. Tattoos are not a good idea in the next 5 years. Do not consider any that are ‘oriental’ you will come to regret them.

13. The level of popularity you have had at school will only continue for the next two years at college – make the most of it.

14. Lambrini is not wine. Neither is it big or clever.

15. Worry less about what other people think. It matters not.

16. The Manic Street Preachers are very cool – but self-harm isn’t.

17. Keep horseriding. Your knee will not improve unless you do.

18. Spend more time with Nana, she is going to become a major friend and confidante in your life.

19. TRY and save. Otherwise you will be paying off debts into your 30s.

20. Never ever say no to anything unless you really have to – be open to new ideas.

Isn’t it funny how at 16 we really do think we know everything when really we are still just kids. This kind of reflection makes me pretty glad I am not a parent because I am certain my folks probably did warn me about most of these things back in the day but of course I did not listen. 

Oh and one final note on all this, I recently discovered that one of the oriental tattoos I insisted on getting at age 18/19 and thought said ‘Friendship’ actually says the Chinese surname ‘Zhong’. Karma, as they say, is a bitch.

Emphasis is Everything

Hey folks

So - I wrote a blog the other week about being a woman and there was quite a lot of response to it, some of which was a bit baffling...

I felt like I had said "in my opinion this wall is painted yellow" and then people kept saying "DON'T assume this wall is not red!" and I was like...um...I didn't say that...and revisiting the blog to try and figure out why and how a totally different message was being read in what I had written. I was utterly confused until I spotted the following example of why the English language is both beautiful and stupidly complex at the same time.

Near the end of the post as a defining point, I had written the following sentence - the emphasis in capitals is where I meant it to be:

"our lives are not EMPTY because we don't have kids, our lives are wonderfully full"

But it seems that just by shifting the emphasis on to a different word this sentence caused offence and seemed very provocative - it was being read, I believe, like this:

"our lives are not empty BECAUSE we don't have kids, our lives are wonderfully full".

Can you see what I mean?

I was confused as to why people kept saying that I had inferred that it was impossible to lead a full life WITH children when my point had been that it was totally possible to lead a full life WITHOUT them. 

Anyway, I am still mulling on whether to edit the post to put the emphasis where it should be. I probably will because I don't want future readers to think I meant the second message and not the first. 

It just goes to show that no amount of proof reading can prevent an unexpectedly reversed interpretation. It's all part and parcel of daring to say what you think online I guess and it is a minefield. 

Ignoring Protocol

I am not a girly feminine girl by any stretch of the imagination. When I was a small child I did not play with dolls, in fact I had no interest in dolls whatsoever, it was all about stuffed animals with me. I never owned a Barbie or wanted to. I disliked dresses (I still do) and preferred trainers to heels until I was about 20. Then I decided I do kinda like heels sometimes, maybe 1 day in 50 but only if I don’t have to walk anywhere in them.

I have spent my entire life studiously ignoring what the world tells me I should be and do because I am a woman. I got married in a trouser suit (and anyone who remembers the trauma of trying to find a dress will smirk in reflection of the horror – it was not a smirking occasion at the time, I can tell you). I did not have bridesmaids either or a hideous ‘L plate’ hen do.

I do not wear make-up unless I REALLY have to and then I sort of resent it. This worries me as I am getting older and starting to realise that unless I start learning how to put make up on properly and on a daily basis my face will really start to resemble a bag of spanners all the time whereas up to now I have pretty much got away with just not bothering at all. I am basically useless at applying make-up when I can be arsed, which is thankfully not very often.

I do not understand how anybody can take longer than 30 minutes from bed to door in a morning. Thankfully my disinterest in cosmetics helps with this. I can shower and sort my hair out in around this timescale but I will never be cheerful in a morning, I like my sleep too much which is why I am the master at getting ready in the least time possible.

I get my eyebrows waxed every few months (I currently have not had them done since we left the UK in March though) and I get my hair cut and coloured every couple of months too – these are really my only concessions to ‘female’ routines.

I have always had close friends who are men – I find them so much easier to relate to than women and less bitchy. I naturally feel relaxed walking into a pub on my own and I do not need any guidance to place bets on sport (although I usually take it from my husband as he has much better gambling instinct than I do).

Thankfully, I landed a husband who loves me for the fact I am not concerned with traditionally female whiles. I think he would have an almighty shock if he realised how much time and money I could feasibly spend on adhering to such things but I have no intention of doing so (aside from the worrying fear of HAVING to start wearing make up every day or even just more often).

None of this is learned behaviour – I just really have never naturally had any desire to go down that path and likewise I don’t like children or baby related things and have never really wanted to be a mother (shock horror etc).

Now you would imagine that those that I have grown up close to and who know me well would accept and understand that this is just me, just who I am, just how I am. On the whole they do. My exacerbation at the world mainly comes from interaction with other women who I don’t know so well that like to point out that I don’t have a CLUE what I am doing with my life and need to be careful I don’t make a massive mistake.

It is this attitude of overwhelming arrogance and adherence to social ‘norms’ which frequently makes it difficult for me to build meaningful friendships with other women because they judge me for not liking children, not wanting to throw my life away on them, not planning fastidiously when to fire up the baby machine. They assume that I will, at some point, realise that I have ‘missed the boat’ with the kids thing, now that I am nearly 35 I should be starting to TICK, goddamnit!

And I am socially adept enough to smile and let it go over my head most of the time and I adhere to the fact that it is not socially acceptable for me to point out to someone who defines themselves primarily as a mother that I personally disagree with that life-choice. I refrain from telling them I think they made a huge mistake in sacrificing their free time, disposable income and identity for this small, whining monster even though they make no such allowance for me and my choice not to procreate.

Having kids is a choice. Once you make it you accept that your life will change irrevocably and if that’s your thing and it’s what you want to do then – hell yeah – go ahead and do it. I will be joyous for you, celebrate it with you, remember your kid’s birthdays and mentally cross you off the list of people we socialise regularly with. But please don’t try to ram it down my throat as though I am some kind of slightly idiotic moron who does not know my own mind.

I am SMUG about not having kids because my free time is my own, I share it with the one person I want to in the world, I read, sleep, work out, socialise when and how I want, we travel, plan adventures together; our lives are not empty because we don’t have kids, our lives are wonderfully full.

Now, can anyone teach me how to apply foundation without looking like a pantomime dame? That would be a USEFUL thing for me to learn from another woman.

#100 Books - A Secret History, WOW!

So – I just found my first absolute GEM in this challenge and it’s a book I had never actually heard of before starting it, which, given what I have learnt about it since, is kinda shocking. I am a big fan of Bret Easton Ellis and have read all of his books, particularly enjoying Less Than Zero and The Rules of Attraction, the latter of which contains some characters which are cross referenced in Tartt’s A Secret History. It transpires that Tartt and Easton Ellis are friends who met at College – and it was this college (Bennington, Vermont) which became the basis for her Hampden and his Camden campuses respectively.

The story is a highly engaging and well written account of some murders which occur around and have links to the group of friends which the narrator (Richard) is part of. It is more a story about WHY the murders happen and how it affects those involved than it is about who committed them and this is one of the fascinating elements of the book. The characters are fabulous; vivid, strongly defined and easy to imagine meeting in your everyday life. From about 5 pages in I was absolutely hooked.

Tartt manages to convey with spooky accuracy the feel of being at college (University in the UK) and that period after arriving where groups of friends are forming and patterns of behaviour become set. It is very believable and some events really do trigger parallels for me as a reader, certain personality types which seem to be obligatory in this environment, expectations and attitudes to drink, sex, drugs. The accuracy of her descriptions paints a highly effective background to the story itself and I believe that this is partly why I found it so mind-blowingly engaging.

I can see some clear similarities with Easton Ellis’ style of writing, mainly the way this is paced, some of the language and the highly engaging characters, but Tartt makes this world totally her own and I believe she is far warmer and less clinical in her story than Easton Ellis usually is in his (not that this is a criticism of his work – which is probably better for being so).

I read this book in about a week, mostly in my usual small segments of time on the tram – but it was one of those which I simply felt desperate to retain engagement with and therefore I spent more time in an evening just blissfully reading for pleasure, lost in their world. I love Tartt’s style of writing and will definitely be looking up her other works off the back of this, I wish I had found her sooner and I guess this is where the #100 books experiment pays dividends because for every godawful Little Women experience, there is a solid gold nugget like this one.

I am now on to The Clan of the Cave Bear and it’s early days but going well. So far 4 books down of the 13 I need to complete before year end which is fair progress to stay on track I think.

#100 Books - Little Women

Sunday 28^th July 2013 was a day on which I reached a blessed, waited for, hugely needed milestone in my life. I finally read the last page of Louisa May Alcott’s ‘classic’ novel Little Women and could put the awful thing down once and for all.

Rarely have I actively disliked a book so intensely and so quickly. Some tomes have let me down almost immediately but still had enough of a hook to keep me reading and ignore the poor writing or insipid characters, others have slowly let me down from a strong start and then there are those which have been a continuous, but worthwhile struggle (most recently Crime and Punishment). This was none of the above. It was just utterly bloody horrible.

I am aware that I am kinda trampling all over a book which many people love and for this I apologise. But the fact that this book is held in such affection (and is even on the list of 100 books you should read before you die in the first place) baffles me. I do think that the reason for this bafflement is that I have made the error of trying to read it as an adult when I should have picked it up as a child, when, I am reliably informed, the story would have charmed, rather than annoyed me.

However, I disliked this book so enormously that every single page put me into an increasing rage, to the point where I now feel that even if I had a daughter (it seems to be aimed at a female audience) I would NEVER let her read this terrible manifesto to prehistoric womanhood for fear of it sending all the wrong messages wrapped in a big pile of twee at a time when I would want her to be starting to learn how to be confident in her gender.

"a woman's happiest kingdom is home, her highest honor the art of ruling it not as a queen, but as a wise wife and mother"

For those of you who have not read it - the writing style of this book makes Enid Blyton read like Jo Nesbo. I did not think it possible to make words sound so very sickeningly sugar coated, to the extent that I started to question whether Allcott knew full well what she was doing and was, in fact, taking the piss out of us all. I find it very hard to believe that she meant the reader to take it seriously, even given how long ago this was written (1868). Unfortunately, this astoundingly sugary tone combined with the terrible sanctimonious preaching which the reader simply cannot escape, made me feel like I was being forcefed a hideously pieced together religious diatribe. It was like the Mormons had turned up at the door on their bikes and refused to go away until I had made myself physically sick overdosing on Battenberg whilst they recited psalms.

Anyway, one of my most well-read friends informed me that it is widely acknowledged that Alcott herself thought the book was not that great and knocked it out speedily for cash. This makes me almost admire the woman for her audacity, although I have lost hours and hours of my life to this dirge. Further evidence of this theory that Alcott was being rather tongue in cheek comes from one of the subplots where Jo is trying to pedal her short stories to an editor who tells her: .

"People want to be amused, not preached at, you know. Morals don't sell nowadays."

I almost sniggered at the blatant hypocrisy of this statement within such a novel. It surely must be a joke?

The characters in this book all seemed pretty beige and unlikable to me, except for Jo who is almost ok and, I can slightly agree, is the ‘anti-heroine’ of the piece. Even she, however, is prone to the seemingly standard pattern of wailing and whining about life before receiving some kind of moralistic speech from the (slap-worthy, tedious and pious) Mrs March and declaring that her lesson is learnt. She also writes terrible poetry (akin to my 14/15 year old teenage angst attempts but without the mildly interesting swear words) which pretty much prevents me from liking her much even though she is marginally less of a wet lettuce than the rest of them.

I was reminded by a friend about the episode of Friends where Joey reads Little Women (encouraged by Rachel) and gets very upset when Beth dies. It was probably because of this that I was already aware of the event before I got to it, however, Beth is hardly formed as a character at all, continually referred to as the quiet, placid, demure, home bird (or being blunt, just really fucking boring)….so it was rather hard to feel too saddened at her eventual (although rather dragged out) demise. It also prompted more of Jo's awful poetry which in turn caused some swearing from me.

I am sorry, to all the Little Women fans out there. I really did give it a fair go but I really detested this book. I guess doing the 100 Books challenge is bound to produce some experiences like this, as well as some absolute gems (one of which I am now reading - The Secret History by Donna Tartt) and that's what it's all about. You can absolutely rest assured that there is no way in hell I will read the rest of this series of books or ever pick this one up again.

Ciao.